FROM "Next of Kin" in 1984 through "The Sweet Hereafter" in 1997, Atom Egoyan has made impeccably controlled films, often on the theme of people's desire for control. So how did he feel during the shooting of his new movie, "Felicia's Journey," when Satan seemed to turn up on screen in place of the expected Bob Hoskins?

"I was completely unsettled," Mr. Egoyan blurts when the subject comes up. As if his polished vocabulary has failed the occasion, he stammers an additional, "Just creeped out."

"Felicia's Journey," which opened on Nov. 12, is Mr. Egoyan's first foray into genre storytelling -- the serial-killer genre, at that. Adapted from a 1994 novel by William Trevor, the film explores the mutually perilous relationship between the title character (Elaine Cassidy), a pregnant and forlorn teenager from present-day rural Ireland, and Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), the lonely, strangely old-fashioned Englishman who befriends her. As Hilditch draws Felicia into his car, his confidence and his home, the audience (in flashbacks) begins to glimpse a menace that escapes her understanding: Hilditch has helped other young women, none of whom has been seen again.

It's a fine premise for a suspense film -- and yet Mr. Egoyan, characteristically, has been less interested in any threatened action than in the characters' states of mind. The film is by turns droll and disquieting, compelling and distanced. But it is so little concerned with turning your knuckles white that Mr. Egoyan, on a recent visit to New York from his home in Toronto, seems shocked at the one scene where he explicitly called up the Satanic picture of evil.

That moment comes in a scene in which Hilditch pressures Felicia to have an abortion. "It was the only point where I directed Bob to be a monster," Mr. Egoyan recalls. "I gave him such a shocking mental image for his close-up, he recoiled. Then he gave the performance you see," taking on an expression of cold, determined rage.

But there was more. Without realizing he had done so, Mr. Egoyan had framed the shot so that Mr. Hoskins's ears, backlit in red, seemed to grow upward to a devilish point.

"Our mouths dropped when we saw the rushes," Mr. Egoyan says. "Ordinarily, when I screen the past day's work, I look for a confirmation of what I saw happening on the set. I also hope for some magic when I see these images given back to me. But this was an actor completely transformed.

"None of us had anticipated it: a special effect, built into the physiognomy of Bob Hoskins's head."

Those who have tracked Mr. Egoyan's 15-year career know how rarely he loses control of an image. "Whatever you discover in one of Atom's scenes," says Richard Pena, director of the New York Film Festival, "you can be sure he has thought of that idea himself, plus three more." This mastery begins with the screenplay -- and so Mr. Egoyan has found it a challenge to graft his own imagination onto another author's, and so lose a degree of autonomy.

"I'd always identified myself as a writer," he says. Yet after he adapted Russell Banks's novel "The Sweet Hereafter" -- for the first time directing a film he hadn't written from scratch -- Mr. Egoyan suddenly found he was a popular target for producers and agents pitching literary adaptations. "It was a confusing time," he says. Then Icon Productions sent him "Felicia's Journey."

"It was extremely compelling to me that Hilditch talks Felicia into having an abortion," he recalls. "To make an informed choice, we have to know ourselves, know our needs. Yet here are two characters, making such a profound decision together, and both are in denial of their situations. That seemed very arresting -- and it allowed a further articulation of a number of themes I've been exploring all along. How does denial operate? Where do people situate their consciousness, their feelings?"

For Mr. Egoyan, the most common answer to the latter question has been, "On video."

In the film that established his reputation, "Family Viewing" (1987), a young man makes up for the mysterious absence of his mother by replaying her image on a VCR. He even seems to prefer an audiovisual mom to the flesh-and-blood kind. With a touch of the remote, he can enjoy a mastery that was impossible in the three-dimensional world.

Brothers and lovers also can be replayed in Mr. Egoyan's films.

Witness "Speaking Parts" (1989), which introduces such innovations as the overnight rental boyfriend (please rewind) and the mausoleum with video monitor memorial plaques. For those who insist on real time, "Speaking Parts" also offers live-feed, closed-circuit sexual intercourse.

"The Adjuster" (1991) breaks with the theme of electronic control and electronic distance -- except for one of the characters, a film-board censor, who takes clandestine videos of the pictures she's banning. But in "Calendar" (1993), video-viewing returns full-scale as a ritual for allaying anxiety, and generating it anew. Mr. Egoyan cast himself in the role of a photographer who compulsively relives his divorce, month after month, with the aid of a videotape he took on vacation. While shooting the tape, he was oblivious to his wife's emotions. (The character is played by Mr. Egoyan's own wife and frequent collaborator, Arsinee Khanjian.) Now, replaying the video, he can see he recorded her in the act of drifting away. Video lets him watch her go; video lets him hold on to her.

"A faulty mourning device" is Mr. Egoyan's phrase for these viewing rituals, which perpetuate the pain they are meant to alleviate.

It's a device that can operate even without electronics. In the relatively video-free "Exotica," a man mourns for his lost daughter by repeatedly visiting a strip club. There, a young woman -- at one time the daughter's baby sitter -- joins him in a nightly ceremony of innocence lost and recovered, dancing for him in a schoolgirl costume.

Mr. Egoyan was even able to continue this theme in "The Sweet Hereafter." In Mr. Banks's novel, a lawyer (portrayed with aching intensity by Ian Holm) comes to a town where a school bus has crashed, so that he might convert grieving parents into litigants. What's that, if not a faulty mourning device?

Unfortunately, William Trevor neglected to work Mr. Egoyan's favorite theme into "Felicia's Journey." So Mr. Egoyan took matters into his own hands.

He introduced a new character: an instructor in French cooking, played by Ms. Khanjian as a loopy television diva of high living and high cholesterol. This is Hilditch's mother, lovingly preserved on videotapes of her broadcasts from the 1950's. When first seen in "Felicia's Journey," Hilditch is in his kitchen, watching this departed yet ever-present mother and following one of her recipes step by step. In the pantry is a complete archive of her shows, stored next to the neatly catalogued videos of young women who more recently became love objects for Hilditch.

Although nothing of the sort can be found in the novel, Mr. Egoyan insists that the theme of faulty mourning, and even the cooking show, can be discovered in Mr. Trevor's stories. "He chronicles his characters with compassion, but he also sees the foolish things they do to get on with their lives," Mr. Egoyan says. "I didn't think what I was adding would dishonor William Trevor, because it was inspired by an investigation into his other writings.

"When you adapt, you don't bring just a particular work to the screen. You have to understand the author's whole universe."

For his part, Mr. Trevor has endorsed the film, calling it "a brilliant interpretation of the novel." The choice of words is precise: interpretation, not realization. Even at those rare moments when Mr. Egoyan could have transcribed the book exactly, he chose to transform it instead.

A case in point was the casting of the relatively sturdy Ms. Cassidy as Felicia, rather than a more delicate actress. "We actually found the soft doe described in the book," Mr. Egoyan recalls. "But she wouldn't have sustained the audience's interest. With Elaine, we have an actress who can be as innocent and naive as Felicia without making you lose patience. You understand her decisions at all times."

Out of necessity, Mr. Egoyan was less free in his treatment of the novel's setting. At first, he wanted to move the action to Canada (as he had done in relocating "The Sweet Hereafter" from its original upstate New York). Instead of being from rural Ireland, Felicia would be a French-speaker from Quebec, and Hilditch would live in Victoria, British Columbia, where Mr. Egoyan grew up -- a place that's "more English than England." But the producers who had optioned "Felicia's Journey" had agreed that the film would take place in the original setting, a point on which Mr. Trevor insisted.

YET when Mr. Egoyan began scouting locations for "Felicia's Journey," he found some translation would still be needed. Ireland has recently grown prosperous; it was hard to find a depressed town to stand in for the one in the novel. As for Hilditch's city, "The English Midlands exists in all our imaginations as the place of dark Satanic mills," he says. "But when you go there, you find industrial parks, which are like the industrial parks everywhere else in the world. Rendering the location is not a question of what you show but of how you frame it, so that it seems more menacing than it might be."

The film's sense of menace is broader than the book's. So too, is its sense of humor. Nothing in the novel quite compares with the image of Hilditch sharing a formal dinner with his televised mother, whom he views through opera glasses. Nor is there anything like the moment when Hilditch threateningly climbs the stairs -- to the accompaniment of a nerve-twisting, atonal crescendo in the score -- only to pause and peer straight into the camera. Here and elsewhere, as Stephen Holden wrote of "Felicia's Journey" in The New York Times, "we have the feeling of being toyed with in the same way Alfred Hitchcock delighted in tweaking film audiences with little pranks."

Such passages testify once more to Mr. Egoyan's control, over both the source material and the viewer's response. To unfriendly critics, his themes of emotional and intellectual manipulation are too well suited to a style they find cold and contrived. A more sympathetic viewer might reply that a preoccupation with control is only to be expected in a filmmaker so keenly aware of the underlying drift in human affairs.

No doubt Mr. Egoyan's Armenian parentage contributes to his pervasive feeling that things slip away. This is nowhere more evident than in "Calendar," in which expatriation from Armenia becomes linked with estrangement from a wife. Perhaps this background of displacement also colors the adaptation of "Felicia's Journey," which intensifies the novel's evocation of history's troubles as a living presence. In the book, Felicia struggles to understand the Midlands accent once she comes to England. In the film, as we see in flashback, she speaks Gaelic as her mother tongue.

But the passages that testify most eloquently to uncontrollable chance in "Felicia's Journey," as in the other films, are those sequences in which the camera glides and floats between seemingly disparate scenes, with the connections left unstated and the meanings in doubt.

Curiously, "Felicia's Journey" does not dwell on the section of the novel that first invited such treatment: a stretch of some 40 pages late in the book in which Mr. Trevor withholds information about Felicia's fate. Mr. Egoyan collapsed that part of the narrative into a minute or two of screen time.

Then again, it's possible to say that Mr. Egoyan expanded that part of the novel, so that the entire story now hovers in uncertainty. The mysteries of Hilditch's dislocated conscience, and of Felicia's determined naivete, remain so. Even the lines between perception, imagination and memory become blurred. It's not always easy to determine whether we're watching a videotape or an hallucination.

Only in the final two shots does "Felicia's Journey" come to a resolution -- and even then, the camera's gaze drifts up to the treetops and into the sky.

It's a surprisingly meditative conclusion for a serial-killer movie. But then, even in making a suspense film, Mr. Egoyan has prompted his audience to wonder, "What happened?" rather than "What happens next?" Ask him to sum up the story of "Felicia's Journey," and he doesn't mention murder at all. "The film is an investigation," he says, "of how two people meet and throw each other into jeopardy."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times